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The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction

But how, exactly, is the truth in nonfiction determined? How much of what is being told should be true? And who is the final arbiter of truth . . . ? The line between fiction and nonfiction is often debated, but is there a single dividing point or an all-encompassing truth a writer is supposed to tell?

—LEE GUTKIND

I’m writing an essay about my grandmother. I’m not sure why I’m writing this; there are just certain scenes and images that haunt me and I have to get them down on paper: my grandmother immobilized in a hospital bed, the ties of her hospital gown undone around her collarbone; my mother crying quietly in a restaurant as she tells me she can’t bring herself to care for her mother in her home. As I write, I have to make several questionable choices: Do I really remember massaging my grandmother’s back that day in the hospital? Now that I’ve written it, the scene’s taken on the stamp of truth, seems to have replaced any “real” memories I might have of that day. And do I relate the scene of my mother’s shame; is it really my story to tell? Can I imagine a scene between my mother and my grandmother, the difficulty of touch between them?

In the end, several months later, I decide to leave in the massage scene—it has an emotional truth to it, a resonance that indicates to me the memory is valid, not only for the essay but for myself. But I delete the scene with my mother in the restaurant; though the facts of this moment are more readily verifiable, I’ve decided that it oversteps some boundary I’ve set up for myself. That part is not my story to tell—I don’t have the authority or the permission—and it feels too risky. I also, therefore, need to cut the scene where I imagine my mother and grandmother together in our family home. This is a difficult cut—I love the writing in that section—but it needs to go because the scene no longer fits in with the trajectory of the essay.

Yet I know that none of this writing has been wasted. Through writing the scenes I eventually eliminated, I came to understand what was important for this particular essay: to focus my attention on the metaphors of touch, the difficulties of such simple gestures within the family. I also learned how I draw the theoretical lines for myself, how I choose to go about negotiating the ethical land mines of creative nonfiction.

—BRENDA

A Few Caveats About Writing from Life

Creative nonfiction is a tricky business. On the one hand, you have the challenge—and the thrill—of turning real life into art. But on the other hand, you have to deal with all the issues that come attached with that “real life.” A fiction writer is able to create the set amount of characters necessary for the story’s action; can you do the same thing with the characters you encounter in your own life and research? When fiction writers need dialogue, they write dialogue. As a nonfiction writer, can you make up dialogue you don’t remember verbatim? When you’re writing essays based on research, how much of your imagination can you use? Does “nonfiction” mean “no fiction”?

Also, how do you create a piece inhabited by the self without becoming self-centered? And how do you negotiate all the ethical and technical obstacles that come with writing from real life?

The Pact with the Reader

In creative nonfiction—more so, perhaps, than in any other genre—readers assume a real person behind the artifice, an author who speaks directly to the reader. Just as in spoken conversations, it’s a symbiotic relationship. The reader completes this act of communication through attention to the author’s story, and the author must establish right away a reason for the reader to be attentive at all.

Simply presenting your work as an “essay” rather than a piece of fiction sets up certain assumptions. The reader will be engaged in a “true story,” one rooted in the world as we know it. Because of this assumption, readers need to know they are in good hands, in the presence of, in Vivian Gornick’s words, a “truth-speaking” guide who will lead them somewhere worthwhile. Philippe Lejeune, in On Autobiography, calls this the “pact with the reader.” The essayist pledges, in some way, both to be as honest as possible with the reader and to make this conversation worthwhile.

Or your authorial presence may be more slippery, even unreliable. Writers like John D’Agata, in his book The Lifespan of a Fact, play with truth to create narratives that aim to accomplish something different from a story built on pure reporting. Defending himself for changing details and dates of a tragedy in Las Vegas, D’Agata writes flatly, “It’s called art.” D’Agata is clear that, for him, facts pale in the face of larger aesthetic demands. Other authors’ unreliability can be a self-revelation that also transcends the facts of their experience. Robin Hemley, in the preface to his book Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness, writes, “As for me, I have a larcenous heart.” Sometimes, truth is not the truth of facts, but something deeper.

So how does a writer establish this pact with the reader? In the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, essayist Phillip Lopate writes that “part of our trust in good personal essayists issues, paradoxically, from their exposure of their own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust.” When we reveal our own foibles, readers can relax and know they engage in conversation with someone as human as they are.

Good writers can also establish this pact through their skillful manipulation of the techniques that make for vivid writing (see Chapter 12, “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form”). We assume that the writer has shaped the material for its best literary effect, while at the same time remaining as true as possible to the acts of the world and history.

Let’s take a look at some skilled essayists and see how they establish a pact with the reader early on in their work, combining craft with content:

•   Joan Didion (“Goodbye to All That”): “That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and the big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air-conditioned to 35° and tried to get over a bad cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”

•   Bernard Cooper (“The Fine Art of Sighing”): “You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure, or boredom, or melancholy. Whatever the emotion, it’s more abundant than you ever dreamed. You can no more contain it than your hands can cup a lake. And so you surrender and suck the air. Your esophagus opens, diaphragm expands. Poised at the crest of an exhalation, your body is about to be unburdened, second by second, cell by cell. A kettle hisses. A balloon deflates. Your shoulders fall like two ripe pears, muscles slack at last.”

•   Jenny Boully (“Choom”): “Her skin was the color of the old catfish that my father dredged from the bottom of the lake. Her skin was like its skin: mottled and blotchy, a yellow bruise. The yellow-browns and the brown-yellows leaked like watercolor. She said she had been playing so hard at the pool; she said she had just been flirting so much at the pool and had just splashed around and jumped around in the water too hard and that’s why she had such a blossoming of splotches.”

•   Eula Biss (“Time and Distance Overcome”): “‘Of what use is such an invention?’ the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1876. The world was not waiting for the telephone.

Bell’s financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—the idea that every home in the country could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us.”

What do you find in common with these four very different essayists? They write about divergent subjects, and their presences within the essay also differ. Didion opens with a memoiristic first person, while Boully starts “Choom” with a poetic, yet disturbing description of another woman. Biss’s tone is initially factual and distant, but moves to a larger idea. Cooper uses second person, slipping the reader into his shoes as he contemplates the human sigh. What these writers have in common is that they’ve constructed a voice that speaks directly to the reader, and immediately engages us.

In her long, breathless sentences, Joan Didion reveals her embarrassment and timidity at being in a city where she knows no one and is unsure of the social conventions. Not only does she reel us in because of the details (we get to be on that bus with her), but she also laughs at herself and invites the reader to laugh with her. “Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” These two sentences establish that Didion has perspective on her experience. We know the material will be shaped and presented by someone who is able to distance herself from the “I” who is a character in her story.

Bernard Cooper reaches out a hand and tugs us into his essay by starting off with the second-person point of view: “You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure.” He makes us a participant in his essay by recreating a sigh on the page. Read the passage aloud and see if you can keep from letting out a long, hearty sigh. And the “you” makes an assertion that’s difficult to deny. The experience he creates on the page does indeed become a universal sigh, exhaled in common with thousands of others.

Boully is not telling a primarily personal story. In this brief essay, she describes a woman named BaNoi, an ill woman who makes sausage with Boully’s mother while the young author plays nearby. Though this piece is not memoiristic in the way Didion’s essay is, the lush descriptions capture the world of the author: the catfish her father catches, the “blossom” reference, the importance of the pool. Immediately, we’re engaged as we wonder about this mysterious woman’s story, such as the reasons she needs to lie about the splotches on her skin.

Biss is the most personally removed as a presence in this lineup of essayists. Her opening is factual, but not in a way that feels boring. We’re immediately captured, in this era of perpetual contact, by the fact that at one time Americans couldn’t imagine wanting phones. Nor is Biss absent as an author. The voice she uses in the third paragraph is the first-person plural, the collective “we.” She speaks for the group, a position she’s earned. The story of Bell’s invention underscores how impossible human connection can feel in the abstract. And Biss’s first-person plural voice still contains a sense of the author. She is not just amused or intrigued by this quirky anecdote of the invention of the telephone. She wants to understand what it means in a larger sense, what hints it gives us toward the human condition.

All these writers, along with the multitude of creative nonfiction writers we admire, must immediately make a case for taking up a reader’s time and attention. In doing so, they also take care of the “so what?” question that plagues writers of creative nonfiction and of memoir in particular. Why should anyone care about your personal story or your perspective on the world? What use will the essay have for anyone outside of yourself? By engaging you in their essays through vivid details and an authentic voice—through imaginative uses of form and structure—these essayists show that the personal can indeed become universal. We care about their stories because they have become our stories.

The Permutations of “Truth”: Fact Versus Fiction

The simple acts of writing and reconstructing experience on the page are essentially creative acts that impose a form where none before existed. Beyond that, what kinds of fictions are allowable and what are not in creative nonfiction? Just how much emphasis do we put on “creative” and how much on “nonfiction”?

Some writers believe that nothing at all should ever be knowingly made up in creative nonfiction. If you can’t remember what color dress you wore at your sixth-grade graduation, then you better leave that detail out or do some studied research to find the answer. If you had five best friends in high school who helped you through a jam, then you better not compress those five into one or two composite characters for the sake of efficient narrative.

On the other hand, some writers believe that small details can be fabricated to create the scenes of memory, and they knowingly create composite characters because the narrative structures demand it. Some writers willingly admit imagination into factual narratives; others abhor it and see it as a trespass into fiction.

It’s interesting to note that when a writer publishes a piece of fiction that contains highly autobiographical elements, no one flinches; in fact, such blurring of the boundaries is often presumed. But to admit fictional techniques into autobiographical work creates controversy and furious discussion. The nature of an “autobiographical pact” with the reader—creating a sense of trust—demands this kind of scrutiny into the choices we make as nonfiction writers.

We believe that writers must negotiate the boundary between fact and fiction for themselves. What constitutes fabrication for one writer will seem like natural technique to another. But what we can do here is show how some writers employ fictional techniques and the effects these choices have on your credibility as an essayist.

Memory and Imagination

If your work is rooted in memory, you will find yourself immediately confronted with the imagination. Memory, in a sense, is imagination: an “imagining” of the past, recreating the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches (see Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory”). In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl writes, “I am forced to admit that memoir is not a matter of transcription, that memory itself is not a warehouse of finished stories, not a static gallery of framed pictures. I must admit that I invented. But why?”

We invent because our lives and the world contain more than simple facts; imagination and the way we imagine are as much a part of ourselves as any factual résumé. In creative nonfiction, the creative aspect involves not only writing techniques, but also a creative interpretation of the facts of our lives, plumping the skeletal facts with the flesh of imagination. Hampl continues, “We find, in our details and broken and obscured images, the language of symbol. Here memory impulsively reaches out its arms and embraces imagination. That is the resort to invention. It isn’t a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate personal truth always is.”

Look back to the tonsil story at the beginning of Chapter 1. There’s no real way to verify either the fact or fiction of the tonsils floating in a jar on the bedside table. What I, Brenda, can do with this image is admit the bizarre and unlikely nature of this mental picture that imagination has called forth in conjunction with memory. I can say, “Why do I remember this jar of tonsils at my hospital bedside?” In so doing, I readily admit the imagination into memory and can then proceed to construct an essay that both interprets the image for metaphorical significance and allows it to become a jumping-off point for a longer meditation on the topics this metaphor suggests. I do not discount or omit this image because its factual veracity is in question. Rather, I relish the opportunity to explore that rich boundary zone between memory and imagination. And I do so in full view of my audience, disclosing my intent, and so maintaining my pact with the reader.

Emotional Truth Versus Factual Truth

Mimi Schwartz in “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” writes,

Go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters. Yes, gather the facts by all means. Look at old photos, return to old places, ask family members what they remember, look up time-line books for the correct songs and fashion styles, read old newspapers, encyclopedias, whatever—and then use the imagination to fill in the remembered experience.

If we allow imagination into memory, then we are naturally aligning ourselves with a stance toward an emotional or literary truth. This doesn’t mean that we discount factual truth altogether, but that it may be important, for literary purposes, to fill in what you can of the facts to get at a truth that resonates with a different kind of veracity on the page. Facts only take us so far.

Schwartz continues, “It may be ‘murky terrain,’ you may cross the line into fiction and have to step back reluctantly into what really happened—the struggle creates the tensions that make memoir either powerfully true or hopelessly phony.” We may reconstruct certain details, imagine ourselves into the stories behind the facts, but certain facts cannot be invented. Or as novelist and memoirist Bret Lott puts it in his essay “Against Technique”: “In fiction you get to make up what happens; in creative nonfiction you don’t get to mess with what happened.”

Take a look at the case of a highly publicized memoir, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. In this lyrical narrative told from a child’s point of view, Binjamin Wilkomirski recreates scenes from his experience as a child survivor of the Holocaust. He recounts his father’s execution in graphic detail, scenes of rats scurrying over piles of corpses. The prose is beautifully rendered, and some scenes move the reader to tears. But shortly after publication of this memoir, critics began to question Wilkomirski’s veracity. One journalist did some investigation and found evidence that showed the writer had never been in a concentration camp at all. Birth certificates and adoption records showed him born in Switzerland in 1941 and adopted into a family shortly thereafter. However, Wilkomirski stood by his memories, which were recovered, he said, in therapy. To him, these memories were as real—they carried just as much emotional truth—as the factual history.

Though we’ve presented arguments that claim emotional truths can be just as veracious as facts, it is not acceptable to appropriate or wholly invent a history that has little or no relation to your own. You still need to use your own history as a scaffolding for the emotional truths you will uncover. There are facts and then there are facts. Which ones are hard and fast?

One of the most publicized controversies in creative nonfiction came with the promotion of James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Chosen for the coveted Oprah’s Book Club, this memoir told in riveting detail Frey’s story of drug and alcohol abuse, criminal activity, and many other unsavory events. Oprah Winfrey, on her show, told viewers it was “like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, ‘What page are you on?’”

But something didn’t sit right with several critics and watchdog groups. The Smoking Gun conducted an in-depth investigation, which revealed that most of what Frey had written was highly exaggerated, if not completely fictionalized. Frey defended his actions, saying that he had “embellished” the truth for “obvious dramatic reasons.” Oprah had Frey back on the show to chastise him for this deception, and the publisher, Nan A. Talese, even went so far as to offer refunds to offended readers.

It could be that the response to Frey’s artifice was so strong because those who “stayed up late at night reading it” felt their own emotions had been trifled with. At the same time, when we read memoir, should we do so with a grain of salt? Five years after her admonishment, Oprah had Frey back on her show to apologize for her reaction; in this interview, Frey said he wasn’t ashamed of his actions, because he believes all memoir writers “do what I did.” Would you be comfortable inserting such fictions in your own nonfiction writing?

“The Whole Truth?”

Sometimes you’ll be troubled not by “facts” that are made up, but by those that are omitted. In essay writing, it’s nearly impossible to tell the “whole” truth. Of necessity, you’ll find yourself needing to pare away certain details, events, and characters to create an essay that makes narrative sense. For example, if you’re writing about something that happened in school when you were ten years old, you’ll have to decide just how many members of your fifth-grade class will make it onto the stage. Who is important and who is not, for this particular essay?

This is an easy one: you’ll naturally choose to flesh out the one or two characters closest to you at the time. More difficult will be knowing when and how to omit the characters that felt important in real life but just get in the way once you land them on the page. For example, Bernard Cooper included his brothers in his early book Maps to Anywhere, but when he wrote the essays collected in Truth Serum, he made a conscious decision to leave his brothers out. This left him open to criticism from reviewers who said he deceived his audience by implying he was an only child. Here is his reply to them, from his essay “Marketing Memory”:

I had three brothers, all of whom died of various ailments, a sibling history that strains even my credulity. . . . Very early in the writing of Truth Serum I knew that a book concerned with homosexual awakening would sooner or later deal with AIDS and the population of friends I’ve lost to the disease. . . . To be blunt, I decided to limit the body count in this book in order to prevent it from collapsing under the threat of death. . . . There is only so much loss I can stand to place at the center of the daily rumination that writing requires. . . . Only when the infinite has edges am I capable of making art.

“Only when the infinite has edges am I capable of making art.” Perhaps that should be a credo we creative nonfiction writers etch on the walls above our desks. For that is what we’re up to all the time: creating those edges, constructing artful containers that will hold some facts and not others.

These “edges” might also be formed by choosing to create “composite characters” or to compress events in time. A composite character is a fictional construction; the author blends the traits of several characters into one or two, thereby streamlining both the cast of characters and the narratives needed to take care of them. Compression of time means that you might conflate anecdotes from several trips home into one composite visit. As a writer and a member of a writing community, you’ll want to think about these devices—and talk about them—to see how they conform to your own writing ethics.

The Dodge

Nonfiction can be deeply personal. It may mean reviving periods in your life that were painful, even traumatic. Many of us get caught between our desire to share our stories, painful or not, and our desire to protect ourselves. We all try, at times, to avoid what is painful, and this problem appears in essay drafts in a variety of ways. Two we see often are what we call “the metaphor dodge” and “the blanket-statement dodge.” If you are writing tough material, it’s worth your while to learn to look for these dodges.

The “metaphor dodge” involves using metaphor—sometime long series or “flights” of metaphor—to take the place of telling the reader what is or was happening. Metaphor gives us a way of comparing an actual thing or event to something else that describes it. In Robert Burns’s line, “O my love is like a red, red rose,”the loved one is the subject of the metaphor—the rose is used for comparison, bringing that concept of a fragrant, lovely (and perhaps, thorny) rose to the reality of the lover. If you find yourself relying on metaphor in sensitive places, check to make sure it is clear what you are actually describing.

The “blanket-statement dodge” is just what it sounds like—using a broad-brush declaration like “childhood was the worst time of my life,” without further scene, detail, or even explanation. Check for these kinds of statements in your drafts, and make sure you are answering not just the “what” question of your reactions, but the “why.” You may be giving the broad-brush version as part of doing “the dodge.”

Of course, it is important to honor your feelings and calculate the personal cost of probing certain subjects. You may need to put off writing certain pieces until you feel ready. Give yourself permission to take your time, moving in small steps, looking for the small details and effective structures that will contain your story (see also Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” for a discussion of “permission to speak,” and Chapter 12, “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form”).

Some Solutions

As with any obstacle, there’s always a way to rise to the challenge and become a better writer for it. Here we offer you a few tried-and-true methods for working your way through the difficulties of writing from personal experience.

Cueing the Reader

As you continue to develop your skills in creative nonfiction, you’ll find that you’ll create your own tools for negotiating some of these tricky areas. Some simple ones to keep in mind, however, are taglines that let the reader in on what exactly you’re up to. Phrases such as “I imagine,” “I would like to believe,” “I don’t remember exactly, but,” “I would like to remember,” or even a simple “Perhaps,” alert the reader to your artistic agenda.

In her essay “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction,” Lisa Knopp coins the term perhapsing as a way to describe the ways we can cue the reader that we are entering the realm of the imagination, filling in the details. She writes: “Perhapsing can be particularly useful when writing about childhood memories, which are often incomplete because of a child’s limited understanding at the time of the event, and the loss of details and clarity due to the passage of time.”

Cueing the reader can be accomplished even more subtly. If you have trouble writing a scene for a family event because it happened ten years ago, try beginning it with a line like, “This is how my father sounded,” or, “This is what Sundays were like at my house.” Then watch the pieces fall into place. These statements are unobtrusive, but they make it clear that you’re not claiming to provide a verbatim transcript of an event.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

Writers can also directly tell the reader what they’re up to. In a daring move, Lauren Slater titled a book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Though this book is full of details that prove to be untrue, Slater stands by her work with an obvious defense: the title tells us, quite bluntly, that she’s fabricating metaphorical experiences. Though you may or may not buy this as a reader, you can’t claim that she didn’t warn you.

If you are dealing with emotional material and find yourself doing “the dodge,” one solution might be to tell the reader why you need to stop telling the story. Try statements that describe to the reader honestly why you are dodging, if that seems appropriate: “This is not my story, but my sister’s, to tell.” With these kinds of statements, you’re doing what we call “breaking the fourth wall.”

In film, theater, and television, “breaking the fourth wall” means breaking out of the piece and in some way acknowledging awareness of—generally, establishing dialogue with—the audience. Often it involves the direct address of a character or characters to the audience. Think of the film Deadpool. The hero, or antihero, of the movie complains to the camera about the hokey conventions of the superhero movie he is trapped in.

By its very nature, creative nonfiction has a permeable fourth wall. Speaking directly to the reader, telling us something about the writing process itself, establishes intimacy, enhances your control of the story, can foreground how you think and/or remember, and can also readjust the contract with the reader. It can, as in this example from Mary Karr, give more rather than less information.

Karr, in The Liar’s Club, tells of a time when her dysfunctional parents farmed her out as a child to live with another family. She writes:

I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don’t mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable, the mind just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. . . . The ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness.

This fourth wall technique teaches the reader about the effects of Karr’s trauma, her intentions as an author, and the quality of her memory itself. Of course, you can’t rely on breaking the fourth wall every time you don’t remember, or would rather not address, a piece of your story. Karr’s words, however, give us a path to navigate around lost or untouchable material.

Sometimes an author can bring in another voice or character to break that fourth wall. This character can help the narrator speak more clearly or directly. For example, in her memoir Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, Abigail Thomas allows her sister to articulate what might be on the reader’s mind. After the first few short chapters, the sister appears:

There are already a lot of husbands floating around, my sister says.

Well yes, I say, I married three times.

That’s what I’m saying, a lot of husbands. Somebody’s going to get confused. Maybe even annoyed.

Well then, I’ll spell it out. . . .

The sister’s voice recurs throughout the book, in conversation with Thomas, usually at a moment when the narrator appears to be struggling with how to convey the totality of her experience or the complexity of her emotions. In an essay Thomas wrote for The Iowa Review about the process of writing this memoir, she describes the crucial part her sister played—both in real life and on the page:

My sister and I drank a lot of coffee and I would show her what I was writing and when she thought there was more going on than I’d gotten at, she insisted I look harder. She was pitiless. She knew me, she knew about my life. . . . She could put me in context, seeing me as part of the times we’d lived through, a perspective I didn’t have. I used our conversations verbatim.

Pitfalls to Avoid: Revenge Prose and the Therapist’s Couch

Ironically, while creative nonfiction can be a tool of self-discovery, you must also have some distance from the self to write effectively. You must know when you are ready to write about certain subjects and when you are not—when you are still sorting them out for yourself. Perhaps you will be able to write about a small aspect of a large experience, focusing your attention on a particular detail that leads to a larger metaphorical significance. See any of the essays in the Anthology for examples of how writers use small details to lead to larger ideas.

This is not to say that creative nonfiction is devoid of emotion; on the contrary, the most powerful nonfiction is propelled by a sense of urgency, the need to speak about events that touch us deeply, both in our personal history and those that occur in the world around us. The key to successfully writing about these events is perspective.

As readers, we rarely want to read an essay that smacks either of the discourse appropriate to the “therapist’s couch” or “revenge prose.” In both cases, the writer has not yet gained enough perspective for wisdom or literature to emerge from experience. The writer may still be weighed down by confusing emotions, or feelings of self-pity, and want only to share those emotions with the reader. In revenge prose, the writer’s intent seems to be to get back at someone else. The offender does not emerge as a fully developed character, but only as a flat, one-dimensional incarnation of awful deeds. In both cases, it is the writer who comes out looking bad.

The best writers also show a marked generosity toward the characters in their nonfiction, even those who appear unsympathetic or unredeemable. For example, Terry Tempest Williams, in “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” writes an essay that is clearly fueled by anger, but it does not come across as personally vengeful or mean-spirited. Most of the women in her family died of cancer, an illness that could have been caused by the government’s testing of nuclear weapons in her home state. By channeling her energy into research, she shows herself as someone with important information to impart, aside from her own personal history. She creates a metaphor—the clan of one-breasted women—that elevates her own story into a communal one. By directing her attention to the literary design of her material, she is able to transcend the emotional minefield of that material. “Anger,” she has said, “must be channeled so that it becomes nourishing rather than toxic.”

The Warning Signs

In your own work, always be on the lookout for sections that seem too weighed down by the emotions from which they spring. Here are some warning signs. Read the piece aloud and see if the prose has momentum. Where does it lag? Those are the sections that probably haven’t found the right details and scenes. And seek out any sections that too directly explore your feelings about an event rather than the event itself. Where do you say words such as “I hated,” “I felt so depressed,” “I couldn’t stand”? The “I” here will become intrusive, a monologue of old grievances.

If you find yourself telling the reader how to feel, then you’re probably headed the wrong way. Channel your creative energy, instead, into constructing the scenes, images, and metaphors that will allow readers to have their own reactions. On the page, your life is not just your life anymore. You must put your allegiance now into creating an artifact that will have meaning outside the self.

TRY IT

1.   Have an individual or group session in which you plumb your own sense of nonfiction ethics. What would you do and what wouldn’t you do? Would you recreate a scene or invent dialogue for someone without a clear cue to the reader? Would you invent a fact? It’s useful to proceed in your writing with a defined sense of your own boundaries.

2.   Practice writing cueing lines. This can be fun to do in a group, while passing one another’s essays around or just writing inventive cueing lines to pass (“If I dreamed this scene, this is how I would dream it.”). Sharing ideas will get you in the habit of using cueing lines creatively.

3.   Try writing out a memory in scene from the perspective of at least two people who were present (members of your family, perhaps). Get their memory down as accurately as you can by questioning them, and write it as carefully and lovingly as you write your own. Think of this as an exercise in the quirks of individual perspective. If you like the results of this exercise, try juxtaposing pieces of each narrative, alternating the voices, to create a braided essay.

4.   Try compressing time by creating one scene out of several similar events. For instance, take moments from several Christmas dinners and create one specific scene that encapsulates all of them. What do you gain and/or lose by doing this to your material?

5.   Are you doing “the dodge”? Go through your drafts and identify those moments most difficult for you to write. Ask yourself simply: How clear is what is happening here? A series of “it was like” or similar type sentences built on metaphor always needs to be scrutinized, asking the question of whether or not the reader knows what exactly was like that. Likewise, search for broad-brush statements giving “that relationship was a nightmare” kinds of declarations.

If you are dodging, write a clear paragraph describing that moment or event purely factually. At this point, decide what of this material you actually need to incorporate into your piece. Or consider other strategies like “breaking the fourth wall.” Let your readers tell you if that move works.

6.   If it is odd that you have no memory of a crucial event from a time period when your memories are otherwise clear and accessible, you may want to state this fact and probe why that might be the case. Your meditation on this trick of memory might, like Karr’s, tell us more about that time than the facts of the memory would.

7.   As Abigail Thomas does in Safekeeping, bring in another character’s voice to speak more directly. How can this character act as a foil to your own memory or experience? How can this voice help you bring in more information?

8.   Read again the opening to Paisley Rekdal’s “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” (see Anthology). How does she let you know that she is creating an experience using her imagination? How does she convince you, if she does, that it’s okay to recreate her mother’s memory? Would you be comfortable doing so?

9.   Comb through an essay you’re writing to ferret out any hint of therapist’s couch or revenge prose. See if you can replace these moments with concrete details or images instead.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “The Fine Art of Sighing” by Bernard Cooper

•   “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” by Paisley Rekdal

Resources Available Online

•   “Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss

•   “Choom” by Jenny Boully

•   “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

•   “The Creative Nonfiction Police?” by Lee Gutkind

•   “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction” by Lisa Knopp

•   “Against Technique” by Bret Lott

•   “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” by Mimi Schwartz

•   “The Clan of One-Breasted Women” by Terry Tempest Williams

Print Resources

•   “Marketing Memory” by Bernard Cooper in The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting

•   The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata

•   “Memory and Imagination” by Patricia Hampl in I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

•   Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness by Robin Hemley

•   The Liar’s Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr

•   “For You, For Me” by Abigail Thomas in The Iowa Review, Volume 36, Number 1

•   Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life by Abigail Thomas

•   Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser